President Bush’s Refusal to Consider Public Opinion on War More Madness Than Hubri

By Kevin Roeten

There had only been the remotest chance that George W. Bush would come to his senses about the mess he started in Iraq and use his nationally-televised address to show us that he was a reformed man. But, no. In his speech on Wednesday evening, the president of the United States only demonstrated that he is more of a goner than we thought. Maybe not raving mad, but still starkly mad, delusional, out of touch and out of his mind -- a man in a bubble, a toy warrior, tilting at windmills. So much for faint hope.

Not that Bush is the first president to tell the American people something they didn’t want to hear.  But I don’t recall one who was so in-your-face about bucking the national consensus. 

Polls? Who cares. Election results? Big deal. What members of Congress are saying? La-dee-dah. The pleas of leading Republicans? Hmmph. Those generals, admirals and commanders? Pffff. Iraqi, Middle East and international experts? Get lost. The Iraq Study Group? Puleezze. The rest of the world? Who do they think they are?

Though he claimed to have “consulted” them all, Bush doesn’t seem to have learned anything. He is committed to his fantasy, and no amount of reason or reality or repudiation can stop him.

And not only is it full speed ahead in Iraq, with Bush’s proposal to put 20,000 more American lives on the line for his misadventure, but Bush even kicked a little sand in Iran and Syria’s faces. “We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq,” he said. 

According to Bush, that means possible strikes on arsenals and the provision of Patriot missiles, both couched as defensive measures, but exactly the kinds of actions that are as likely to start new conflagrations as to prevent or end them.

In his fog, our President Quixote said only one incontrovertible thing: “It is clear that we need to change our strategy in Iraq.” Trouble is that in response to the drowning over there, our President Quixote has decided that the answer is to throw us into deeper water. 

Sen. Chuck Hagel, the Nebraskan Republican, has called Bush’s new scheme “the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam.”

A sane and sensible chief executive would be sobered by such an assessment from a distinguished member of his own party, especially one who is a decorated Vietnam War.  But if past is prologue, not only will the Bush White House ignore Hagel’s caution, but Karl Rove is working up a pig sweat, digging for something with which to discredit the senator. In this White House, you see, they get mad, and they get even.

Not even in the depths of the Watergate scandal was Richard Nixon so dismissive of everyone and everything. He at least put up a front of caring what his fellow Americans thought. Not this fellow. Some call it arrogance, but I think he’s simply too dense to even realize he’s expected to give a damn.

If I hadn’t been seeing this with my own eyes and hearing this with my own ears, I would be inclined to believe Bush’s intransigence has been exaggerated. It seems like a bad, grade C movie. Or some farce, as if Will Ferrell were playing the dope who became president.

Why is Bush so insistent on sticking to his failed policies? Could it be, as some have suggested, that he is whoring for the Saudis, who never fight their own battles anymore but are frantic to keep its oil-rich neighbor down?

Rational people can make no sense of it because rational people don’t think that way. What we need is a crazy man -- a driven, hell-bent, autocrat to decipher this president’s warped mind and tell us how to push his buttons.

But, then, they hung him two weeks ago.